The Tuesday Club

Experience a heart-pumping and thrilling tale of suspense!

Originally published in THRILLER (2006),

edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author James Patterson.

In this historical Thriller Short, New York Times bestselling writer Katherine Neville deals with a little known fact about Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin had an obsessive penchant for creating and joining private clubs, none of which was more enigmatic than the Lodge of the Nine Sisters and its founder, Mme Helvetius, one of the wealthiest and most beautiful women in France. When an encoded message from Scotland arrives at her home, Helvetius sets out in disguise to deliver it to Benjamin Franklin, who she knows will be able to decipher its hidden meaning. As luck would have it, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson are in France at the time. What transpires is a lesson in the cryptography of the time and a warning of an impending chaos that may threaten the fledgling United States of America.

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THE TUESDAY CLUB

Katherine Neville

www.harlequinbooks.com.au

CONTENTS

The Tuesday Club

KATHERINE NEVILLE

Katherine Neville’s award-winning first novel, The Eight, is widely regarded as a cult classic, translated into thirty languages. That story begins at the dawn of the French Revolution when a fabulous, bejeweled chess set, once owned by Charlemagne but buried for a thousand years, is dug up by the nuns of a French abbey and scattered around the world to preserve its mysterious powers. The nonstop suspense moves from the 1790s of the French Revolution to the 1970s of the OPEC oil embargo. The plot itself is a giant chess game, and the characters are pieces and pawns.

When Neville began her long-anticipated sequel, she was glad that she could retrieve many fascinating historic figures, characters like Benjamin Franklin who, due to earlier schedule constraints, she’d had to limit to walk-on parts. But even despite the recent flurry of additional histories, biographies and films heralding Franklin’s three hundredth birthday, Neville’s research offered her a big surprise that, inexplicably, none of the experts appeared to have noticed. When it came to her character’s well-documented, almost obsessive, penchant for creating or joining private clubs, here was an enigmatic gap in his life.